An Audience of Experts Awaits You…

On the Growing SIPA Listserves

Here’s your quiz for today: Where did we find the following four very interesting discussion fragments?

on pop-ups
I’m particularly fond of the delayed pop-ups lately. They allow people to have a look-see and make sure they’re in the right place and interested in the content before we promote to them. I think this makes for a better user experience. Or at least I tell myself that.

on marketing-IT relationships
I don’t believe that marketing managers can succeed in a digital information products company without some basic understanding of what technologies impact their products, their markets and their competitive landscape any more than a Web developer can just willy-nilly add every new function or widget developed for manipulating information on a Website and hope to generate income as a result.

on editorial structure
We use In Copy for print but have a bridge between In Copy and our Web CMS so when the article is finished in In Copy, it automatically is sent to the appropriate Website without having to manually copy and paste it in the CMS. Editors can also author content in the Web CMS for Web-first /Web-only content, which is growing rapidly and now eclipses print-first content.

on the balance of free and premium content
This is a perpetual challenge for us, as we’ve always had free content plus premium, but we’ve never required registration for free. Instead we push our free e-newsletter as a ramp for the premium. We’ve made some big changes in the past year after finding out through surveys that some of our free users did not even know we had a premium option – which is a problem that can arise from offering both free and premium content.

The answer is (drum roll please)….the SIPA Listserves. One of the most helpful of SIPA’s many membership benefits, the SIPA Listserve contains no less than seven separate discussion threads: Electronic Publishing (SIPAElecPub); Editorial (SIPAEdit); Marketing (SIPAMktg); Fulfillment/Operations (SIPAFulfillment); Conferences (SIPAConference); Information Technology; (SIPAIT); and Large Publishers (BIGPUB).

Some are more active than others—Marketing usually has the most action—but SIPA staff and member volunteers are making a push to increase the traffic flow on all of them. At an Editorial Breakfast Roundtable at SIPA 2010, attendees were upset that a very lively discussion would have to be curtailed due to time constraints. When it was suggested that the Editorial Listserve would be a great place to continue the discussion, they were thrilled.

Other recent questions/tips to appear on the Listserves include:
– At the SIPA conference, several people mentioned robo-calling services that allow you to leave messages on prospects’ voicemail (late at night). Can anyone recommend a service that can help us with this?
– This is very interesting – check out this new way to combine publisher-generated and user-generated content.
– I’m looking for advice and tips on creating media kits for potential advertisers, especially any considerations for the specialized info publishing world versus mass/general media.
Read this interesting analysis of downtrend in time/pages that people spend on portals. Implications potentially challenging. As if there aren’t enough challenges around!

As you can see, the information, discussions, questions, leads and group-forming—one just formed for an ongoing SIPA benchmarking/discussion about CMS and CRM systems integration—portray a dazzling array of information. And as a member, you can access that information now by going to the “Online Communities” on the SIPA Website.

What are you waiting for? Join the discussion now!

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Not a member? Sign up for a free trial membership now
and get a look for yourself at these valuable Listserves.

It’s worth it even if you just have one or two questions
that you’ve been dying to ask.
Where else are you going to find an immediate audience of experts
with hands-on, been-there-done-that experience?
Become a SIPA member today!

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